As the year begins to draw to a close, we reflect on the community engagement and inclusive digital projects our experts have delivered in 2025, along with the steps forward with accessibility in society.
A turning point for digital inclusion
2025 has been a transformative year for digital accessibility.
We’ve seen:
- One of the biggest steps forward with legislation coming into force with the European Accessibility Act (EAA). This new law requires everyday products and services to be accessible – expecting to improve the lives of at least 87 million people.
- Rapid advancements with AI assisting businesses and individuals to easily assess and create inclusive content.
- A great range of new groundbreaking apps and technologies that are empowering people to navigate and complete daily activities.
- Meta finally enabling social media scheduling platforms to incorporate alt text with imagery.
The combination of AI advancements and the EAA has helped in shifting mindsets from accessibility being a ‘nice to have’ feature to a strategic priority, making 2025 a game changer for inclusion.
HeX’s mission to shape an inclusive digital world
This year, marked a significant milestone for our team – celebrating a decade of working together. Ten years of working towards a shared vision, sharing challenges, and supporting growth. What began as a small dedicated team with a commitment to accessibility and inclusive design, has evolved into a deeply collaborative partnership that is built on trust, innovation, and long-term impact. Reaching this milestone has given us a moment to look back with pride, but also forward with excitement.
Whilst we reflect, we look over the projects that have been keeping us busy over 2025, supporting over 40 organisations across public, private, and not-for-profit sectors with their inclusive digital needs.
Driving inclusion through accessible web development
It’s been a productive year, that has been defined by meaningful collaborative working, technical creativity, and our ongoing mission to make digital experiences clearer, simpler, and more inclusive for everyone.
Clients that are placing their users at the heart of their digital space include our team:
- Providing a seamless digital transition for enei when rebranding to Onvero, ensuring the migration across domains was secure and disruption-free.
- Assisting the residents of Newark & Sherwood District Council to find What’s On in the area.
- Promoting financial news and events for investment specialists Fiske.
- Helping the people of Nottingham and Nottinghamshire to gain instant access to sexual healthcare
- Refreshing the look and feel of B3Sixty’s practitioners website.
- Supporting a fellow agency in developing a striking, accessible HR business transformation solution.
This year also marked a major shift in our development work by building advanced system solutions. Projects for Ahead’s WIDE Framework and continued work on Onvero’s TIDE benchmark had a focus on developing self-assessment platforms that transform complex data into user-friendly tools. These tools actively improve inclusion, support disability employment, and help organisations to assess, embed and sustain an inclusive workplace culture. These projects represent a shift towards how digital benchmarking solutions don’t just inform – they empower organisations to create more inclusive environments and take steps towards making meaningful change. Our focus on self-assessment platforms reflects a broader commitment to supporting systemic progress across the disability and EDI landscape.
Over the past 10 years, HeX has made a name for itself in the industry for the extensive accessibility support that we’ve provided in higher education. This year has been no different, with this sector continuing to be one of our strongest areas of impact. Along with accessible web development for the likes of Durham University, Bulletin Academic, and the SEND & Inclusion Alliance, this year we:
- Built a first digital presence for Trinity Specialist College. This transformative project, which began as a single stand-alone landing page, evolved into a modern, intuitive, and accessible website that reflects the heart of the college and its community.
- Helped to grow educational enterprise initiatives for Homefield College, by building a series of microsites in one centralised system.
- Cleared stressful user journeys on results day for Queen Mary University of London and the University of Winchester.
- Continued to support universities using Terminalfour, with our team being the official preferred contractor for the company.
Removing accessibility barriers through robust audit testing
A great range of businesses have stepped up to prioritise accessibility and the experience their online services provide in 2025.
Through performing comprehensive automated scans, manual usability tests with assistive technologies, and expert code reviews, our team have sought out hundreds of digital barriers that impact primarily on disabled and neurodiverse users.
Businesses championing digital inclusion includes clients such as:
- The global leader in specialist media Future PLC for brands TechRadar and WhoWhatWear.
- NHS Sherwood Forest Hospitals, who work alongside health and social care colleagues to provide acute and community healthcare services to more than 420,000 people across the county.
- The UK’s most-loved online florist Bloom & Wild.
- The blockchain data platform Chainalysis, which provides data, software, services, and research to over 70 countries.
- World leader in the marketing and distribution of food and non-food products for catering professionals Sysco.
These full accessibility audits not only improved compliance, but through providing live demonstrations with the use of assistive technologies, we also helped organisations to understand why their platforms were presenting issues for some users and how accessibility elevates the user experience for all.
Our free accessibility health check initiative has also assisted a magnitude of organisations across the year in taking their first steps towards better inclusivity. This included empowering businesses with a roadmap of required changes of key areas of their digital platforms, such as for Arsenal Direct, Euronics, Romo, the University of Birmingham and many more. In turn, helping companies to begin their accessibility journey to create an inclusive web for all.
Providing effective ongoing digital support
From technical web development, accessibility support, and design updates – to hosting and security, and driving traffic through SEO and Pay Per Click advertising, our experts have been taking the stress out of website management over 2025 for a great range of clients.
This includes:
- University of Winchester
- NUH Life
- Onvero
- Fiske
- Homefield College
- Shaw Trust Accessibility Services
- Live Arts Development Agency (LADA)
Raising awareness on the need to consider digital accessibility
Along with providing a great range of accessibility solutions across the year for our clients, we’ve been on the road raising awareness about the obstacles many people with disabilities face in the digital world.
- Guest speaking at live events and webinars on shaping the digital landscape through accessibility and ways to prevent losing revenue through UX design.
- Inspiring students through interactive workshops at Oxford Deaf Festival and a Year 6 Careers Day, held for schools across Nottingham, on the varying career routes available within the digital world.
- Helping all students to thrive by providing educators with eye-opening empathy lab experiences, free accessibility health checks, and live demonstrations with assistive tech at conferences such as Natspec, the National SEND & Inclusion Conference, and the National Association of Special Schools (NASS).
Looking ahead to 2026
We’ve been excited by the momentum in accessibility, with new laws and ways of working coming into place, and hearing more active conversations around the need for digital inclusion in 2025. Although there is still a long way to go in terms of the web becoming accessible, as this year’s WebAIM Million report discovered, it’s exciting to see such positive, groundbreaking strides forwards.
The HeX team is proud of this year’s achievements, which is a testament to collaboration, innovation, and working towards a shared purpose. Here’s to another year of delivering accessible, user-centred digital experiences that make a real difference!
If you’re ready to make transformative change in the digital world in 2026, get in touch or take a look at our great range of end to end inclusive solutions.
We want to take this opportunity to thank our clients for prioritising accessibility and we’ve enjoyed working with each and every one of you. We hope you all have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
